man who ever lived-just the eighth-
richest American alive right now, Forbes
reckons-but he is by far the richest
person in the city he governs. The Times
reports that he will have personally
spent well over a hundred million dol-
lars getting reëlected this year, noting,
"He has now spent more of his own
money than any other individual in
United States history in the pursuit of
public office." But even that's not the
bottom line, not really. Bloomberg isnt
just the city's biggest getter; he's also the
city's-and the nations-biggest giver.
Last year, he showered two hundred
and thirty-five million dollars in cash on
organizations that do all kinds of good
works in fields like health, education,
and the arts. Good works are a good
thing. When it comes to political power,
though, Bloomberg's giving has been a
powerful strategic asset to Bloomberg's
getting. Five hundred-plus of the twelve
hundred-plus recipients of the Mayor's
personal largesse are based in the city.
The world of nonprofits and charity
dinners and patronage of the arts in-
cludes a large swath of the city's power
élite. One may note that the Mayor had
the support, tacit or open, of that élite
when he contrived to overturn the law,
twice approved by the voters, that wowd
have barred him from a third term. One
may also note that he enjoys similar sup-
port from the city's most prominent
black pastors, whose churches and causes
benefit from what the Times calls his
"unusual combination of city money, pri-
vate philanthropy, political appoint-
ments and personal attention," even
though his opponent (for the record, that
would be the current city comptroller,
Bill Thompson) is Mrican-American.
In broad outline, N ew Yorkers know
all this. We know that wè re bought and
,
/\
/
"
paid for. We know that there is some-
thing unseemly, even humiliating, about
submitting ourselves to be ruled by the
richest man in town. We know that the
muscling aside of term limits, whatever
the law's merits, was a travesty. We
know that the Mayor's campaign this
time has been puzzlingly, pettily nega-
tive. Yet we will, most of us, troop to the
polls on Tuesday and pull the lever for
Mayor Mike. The truth is that Michael
Bloomberg has been a very good mayor.
The record is mixed, of course, but the
mixture is largely positive. Crime is
down. Public education is better, owing
mainly to the Mayor's takeover of the
system. The racial rancor of Giuliani
Time is gone. People are healthier and
longer-lived, and it would be rash to
suggest that the Mayor's nanny-state
initiatives-his smoking bans, his ban-
ishment of trans fats, his posted calorie
counts-have had nothing to do with
this happy development. He has fought
the good fight for congestion pricing
and gun control. His plans for a West
Side football coliseum were thwarted,
thank God, and his new stadiums for
the Yankees and the Mets cost the city
a bundle and are unfriendly to fans of
modest means, but his bike lanes are
terrific and his transformation of Times
Square into a people's piazza was vision-
ary, fun, and cheap.
The Mayor has ruled us well, but
he has infantilized us. We are a little too
much like the passive Romans of Cras-
sus' day, when the institutions of the old
republic were giving way to a despotic
(and competent) imperium. "People got
used to the idea of them," Edith Ham-
ilton wrote of Crassus and his fellow-
triumvirs, Pompey and Caesar, "and
when four years later their powerful
organization was completed and they
"What the labor-relations board doesn't know won't hurt it."
began to act openly, honored and hon-
orable patriots could find excellent rea-
sons for acquiescing in their running the
city. Indeed, it seemed exceedingly
probable that if they did not do so there
would be nobody to run it." If Bloom-
berg had been satisfied with two terms,
he would be leaving office a beloved leg-
end, a municipal god. Hèll get his third,
but we'll give it to him sullenly, know-
ing that while it probably wont measure
up to his first two-times are hard,
huge budget gaps are at hand-it'll
probably be good enough. The Pax
Bloombergiana will endure a while lon-
ger. But then what? Will we have for-
gotten how to govern ourselves?
-Hendrik Hertzberg
HERE TO THERE DEPT.
OUT TO LUNCH
- .
A
0-.
:::--- J.
ø"
" ,..
..,
.
T he week before last, two Northwest
pilots overshot Minneapolis, their
destination, by a hundred and fifty miles,
apparendyoblivious of their instruments
and their internal clocks, as well as of a
barrage of increasingly desperate radio
calls from air-traffic control. Mterward,
they explained that they'd logged onto
their personal laptop computers and be-
come so engrossed-not in Farm Ville or
porn, or even good old off-line activity,
such as a fistfight or a nap, but, rather, if
you believe them, in the nuances of the
airlinè s new crew flight-scheduling pro-
cedure-that they'd essentially forgotten
where they were and what they were
supposed to be doing. Which was land-
ing a plane. The equivalent for a text-
messaging driver might be for him to
veer off a turnpike into a cornfield and
drive twenty miles through the corn
rows-stalks thumping the hood, G.P.S.
lady losing her mind-without once
looking up from the task of typing a
heartfelt response to a wireless provider's
auto-generated telemarketing text. That
is, it's almost unimaginable.
Around the same time, researchers
at Western Washington University re-
leased the results of an experiment in
what's called "inattentional blindness"-
a state of such absorption in an activity